One in particular that resonated with the theme of the Encounter this year was the fifteenth letter, in which Uncle Screwtape tells Wormwood: “Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present…for the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” Reality as it is given in the present moment is the place in which the promise of eternity reveals itself. When asked how he was able to express the intricacies of temptation and sin so precisely, Lewis responded, “That’s easy, I just had to look at my own heart and mind.” This work was a reflection of his continuous battle to maintain the purity of his relationship with reality and to avoid falling into the devil’s “tricks.” The Screwtape Letters were brought to life by actor Jacob Donaldson, who read several excerpts from the 31 letters exchanged between Screwtape and Wormwood. Lewis attributes the givenness of reality to the work of the Creator, who Screwtape calls “the Enemy.” The idea came to Lewis during a Communion service at Holy Trinity Church in July of 1940. ![]() The devil, claimed Lewis, pays close attention to us and goes out of his way to distort our relationship with reality as it is given. ![]() All our wishing cannot change them.” It is through this temptation to “distort” things as we find them that the demons Screwtape and Wormwood seek to win over “The Patient,” the unnamed protagonist of Lewis’s epistolary satire, to the side of “Our Father Below.” Como pointed out that Lewis’s insistence on the existence of the devil and his “tricks” earned him some attention back in the early 1940s –most prominently on a Time magazine cover which depicted him with a cartoon devil perched on his shoulder. “I needed to know about this man.” Como began by reading an excerpt from a lecture given by John Henry Cardinal Newman: “Let us take things as we find them: let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not… We cannot make facts. He recalled how “the color of his landscape was changed” after his first encounter with Lewis. Having fallen in love with Lewis’ writings while teaching undergraduate students at a public university, Como was incontrovertibly attracted to Lewis’s ability to argue a point through a pure obedience to reason. Lewis Society, this reading of Lewis’s classic work provoked the audience to face that sometimes we humans struggle to accept reality in its simplicity. Introduced by Marcie Stockman, founder of the Well-Read Mom book club, and presented by Dr. One of his works, The Screwtape Letters, conveys the unfolding drama of one man’s relationship with reality by means of a collection of letters between a senior Demon, Screwtape, and his nephew, Wormwood. Lewis spent much of his literary career conveying these discoveries of his through a collection of works of literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and creative writing. ![]() This path of discovery leads to the unveiling of a set of interconnected truths that present themselves in reality’s inherent order, ultimately inviting us to a relationship with the origin of reality, which corresponds to our original and most fundamental needs as humans. Reality beckons us to discover a promise within it.
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